Regulators ready to force bay cleanup

Top water pollution regulators are poised this week to force an unprecedented cleanup of San Diego Bay, and there’s a sense among participants that the plan may avoid endless legal appeals after a major reduction in its scope.

After nearly seven years of debate over the cleanup order, dredging could start in September and wrap up five years later. It would be by far the largest cleanup of its kind among similar efforts over the past two decades, and it would set the tone for addressing several other contaminated sites in a bay that used to be one of the most polluted in the nation.

A three-member panel of the San Diego Regional Water Quality Control Board has recommended removing about 143,400 cubic yards of polluted sediment from the bay bottom to protect marine life and people from chemicals and heavy metals lodged in the muck. The six-member board is expected to adopt the recommendations as part of a final ruling Wednesday.

Lead, arsenic and PCBs are among the toxins causing concern because they are linked to cancer or problems such as altering brain development and disrupting hormones. Environmentalists, scientists and community activists say the pollutants are harming the marine ecosystem and endangering the health of people who eat fish and shellfish from the bay. The biggest problems linger from the era before the Clean Water Act and other laws strictly controlled what companies and agencies could discharge to the bay.

Pollutants were deposited over decades by several sources, including construction along the shoreline and polluted stormwater, according to the regional board. Similar concerns have prompted nearly a dozen bay cleanup investigations over the past few decades, but none came close to dredging as much sediment as the current plan calls for at the “shipyard site.” It covers about 143 acres on the eastern edge of San Diego Bay just south of the San Diego-Coronado Bridge. Muck from about 15 acres is expected to be hauled to a landfill, and about 2 acres of tainted bay bottom would be covered in sand.

Wednesday’s meeting comes four months after the board heard four days of arguments over the proposal, which comes with a price tag of $60 million to $70 million. An initial cleanup plan was issued in 2005 for dredging or capping about six times as much sediment.

That approach was criticized as extreme and unnecessary by those on the hook for the work, but the tenor changed when the board scaled back its demands. Regional board officials said in 2010 that it was best to target the most polluted areas and not disturb the others.

During the November hearing, “Most of the parties in the end got up and said that while they didn’t agree with this, they could live with the decision that the cleanup team was recommending,” said David Barker, a senior regional board official. “They were reserving the right to (appeal) if the final decision varied markedly.”

Since then, the board panel made relatively minor changes to the cleanup plan. One was to drop Star & Crescent Boat Company from the mandate, pending litigation to determine if it’s responsible for liabilities of a former port tenant known as San Diego Marine Construction Company.